A Very Serious Note About Butter
Whether you eat a croissant neatly is your business. It is almost impossible, so we’ll give you a pass either way. Coffee with milk or a long black? Iced or hot? Full strength or decaf? You do you.
But butter is where our easygoing attitude ends. We tried to act cool about it. We can’t. We’re butter nerds.
That is why we use two different butters at The Baker’s Duck, each chosen for a particular job. Our croissants are made with butter from France, selected specifically for laminated pastry. Everywhere else butter is called for, including across our dine-in menu, we use Australian-made Pepe Saya Cultured Butter.
ONE FOR FOLDING
A croissant begins with a sheet of butter tucked inside the dough. The two are rolled and folded together repeatedly, building alternating layers of butter and dough. This is called lamination and it is every bit as particular as it sounds.
The butter needs to stay firm enough to hold those layers but flexible enough to move with the dough. Too cold and it can break. Too warm and it begins to disappear into the dough, taking the carefully made layers with it.
In the oven, the layers separate, rise and crisp. The result is a golden shell, an open honeycomb centre and enough flakes to turn breakfast into confetti.
Our croissants use a semi-sourdough process and include spelt flour, which gives them a deeper flavour and subtle nuttiness. The French butter is chosen because it suits that dough and holds up through all that rolling and folding.
At our new Railway Street store, you will be able to watch some of this happening through the glass-fronted kitchen wall. It looks simple when done well. That is generally a sign that someone has spent a very long time learning how to do it.
As Executive Chef Millie Dunn says, “A plain croissant is one of the purest expressions of a bakery’s craft. There’s no filling, glaze or garnish to distract from the quality of the pastry itself.”
There is also nothing to contain the crumbs. Please dress accordingly.
ONE FOR EVERYTHING ELSE
Once the croissants are accounted for, every other butter job in our kitchen goes to Pepe Saya Cultured Butter.
Pepe Saya has been making cultured butter in Australia since 2009. Its butter begins with Australian cream sourced seasonally from six main farms across New South Wales, Victoria and South Australia.
If you have ever wondered what makes butter “cultured”, the cream is pasteurised, inoculated with a lactobacillus culture and allowed to ferment before being batch-churned. That process gives the finished butter its creamy flavour, gentle tang and distinctive aroma.
We use it throughout the rest of our baking and across our dine-in menu. That includes the butter served with warm sourdough, which may be its easiest job of the day.
WHY WE’RE SO PARTICULAR
Millie often reminds the team that “every product is someone’s first experience of your work.”
That is why butter gets discussed at some length behind the kitchen doors. By the time it reaches you, we would rather let the croissant do the explaining. The crumbs will back it up.
